Googlefail

At about 10 am, as I was putting together my daily numbers, Adwords returned a 404 error.

Analytics returned a 404 error.

Thinking that someone may have had fun with my bookmarks, I went to Google to validate the URLs.

Google returned a 404 error.

Checked again. Another 404 error.

So I went to my second favorite “hot topic” search engine – Twitter (tag is #googlefail). Seems that Google and AT&T were not playing well together, and Google was not available in a number of major metropolitan areas globally. Just out of curiosity, I sent a quick IM to a friend to see whether they were having problems – Google was fine in St. Louis (at that point). I went back to Twitter and found that there were other people having problems in different areas. I also saw a number of new theories about what was causing the problem.

At about 10:45, Google was working again, but continued to have some challenges with slow load times in both Adwords and Analytics.

Even with the Twitter storm, IMs, blog posts, and emails on the topic, the absolute best comment is one that I overheard IRL (in real life) from one of the sales people who work in the same office.

Oh my God! Google’s broken. Is the world ending?

Don’t think we’re suffering through the Apocalypse, but it definitely made for an interesting morning.

Now I just wish I had the foresight to screen capture www.google.com with a lovely 404 page showing.

After giving Google a while to even out, I checked on my Adwords campaigns to see what was going on. Although conversions are down a very little bit (read in the .2 – .3% range), cost per conversion today has been about 35% LOWER than it normally is. Do you think my Google rep would be upset if I asked her to set up day-parting and geo-targeting to mirror the rolling Google outage?